Changes
by Kagurazaka
Summary: C.C. throughout the ages - changing, fleeting, bitter. Rated for minor sexual contents.


**Changes**

Disclaimer: CG is not mine.

* * *

She wishes the lashing will stop- that they will just leave her alone, and that a kind man, someone to call a father (with kind eyes and a gentle smile, like she has always dreamed) will appear and take her away. But here, cramped in this cold basement with a foot tied onto the table, she knows better than to hope. Miracles only happen to proper daughters and sons; not to slaves like her.

She learnt that long ago. Her only duty is to serve her master and no more.

* * *

She wishes that he will stop touching her, stop coming into her room when his wife is away.

When she asks why, his answer had been simple, "because you're my little slave." And he grinned before thrusting again. She doesn't like his toothy grin. But she thinks it as normal; she is used to it.

She longs for his wife to come home, but what await her will only be beatings and cruel tasks. She doesn't know which one she prefers: the master's touch or the mistress's beatings.

* * *

When the kind nun treats her broken body and smiles; she knows that her wish will come true.

* * *

For the first time, her life is in blissful contentment.

* * *

She looks into his eyes (for they are the window to the soul, she was taught), and sees love and admiration and infatuation. An honest man, she appraised. Honest and gentle and caring. Not unlike the many men before him.

"I'm sorry," she says softly, and a dull throb started in her ribs, like it had for many men before.

The kneeling figure rises shakily, and she discerns pain when he glances back her way.

They have always taken a piece of her heart when they leave.

* * *

She stares at the beautiful tapestry at the ceiling absently as the man runs his fingers along the curves of her body, their bodies intertwined amidst the white of the sheets. Even as he lands kisses upon her mouth and neck, she pays him no heed and continues to stare. The novelty of pleasure only lasts for so long before it wears out and it is reduced into a trite ritual.

"Let's end this," she says after a while, unclasping his protective hold over her chest and rises from the bed.

"Why?" the man asks; taking the look of a kicked puppy. Even in hurt and confusion, she notices with mild contempt that his eyes still linger over exposed skin as she dons her dress.

She is not cruel, however, and she cups his cheeks with her hands and gives his a brief kiss on the lips. "Nothing," she murmurs against him, "I'm merely bored."

"But I love you!"

She stares into his eyes, and sees nothing beyond the pain and crazed obsession; only a husk of a mind left by the power of the geass.

But then again, lovers are bountiful; all of them brief and fleeting. Perhaps she will stare into the eyes of one of them and find something different.

"I'm sorry," she replies simply, and leaves the shell of a man. He is just one of the disposables; thus she finds no pity for his broken heart, and only pity for herself.

* * *

She feels only profound loneliness when the girl with strange eyes stares back from the mirror. She really does not understand why she feels that way – when she is beautiful and there are countless suitors lined up for her heart, each professing his undying love.

She closes her eyes with a sigh.

Because she only knows too well, why.

* * *

Clutching her bloodied throat, she stares at shock at the dead nun on the floor; lying so peacefully, so gently, so like a sleeping angel with a halo of red beneath her head.

The nun who had treated her so amorously, who spoke only of compassion, who chided her on her playful bouts; who was like a mother figure to her, who in an instant had morphed from an angel to a demon and wielded a knife that tore through her skin and veins and cut away her artery.

She does not know whether to cry from the betrayal and grief, scream from frustration, or to laugh from newfound immortality.

* * *

She holds the dying body of her contractor in her arms and feels as if a part of her is dying alongside with him. She stares deep into his glazed eyes and notes unveiled contempt and hatred and guilt; eyes that accuse her of his death; eyes that had gazed at her with the tenderness of a lover from a fleeting moment that seems so long ago.

She swallows back a sob when he looks at her for the last time and closes his eyes. Life leaves him, and takes along with it the only unbroken part of her.

* * *

She finds herself unable to recall the faces of the men and women from her past; certain scenes of her life; music she had danced to with noble aristocrats and simple farm men.

She weeps at the loss of precious memories.

* * *

When she wakes up amidst splattered brain and gore and finds the bullet wound on her neck nonexistent, she screams in rage and grabs a dead soldier's rifle and fires at everything she sees.

* * *

She sees a girl forced by several men. Her body battered and broken, eyes pleading for help. The girl's mouth opens and she varies between croaking for help and pleading for the men to stop, over and over.

"Help... someone, please," the girl pleads, with a hint of hopelessness and finality, and perhaps a hint of desperate madness.

She steps out from the shadows and guns the men down, absently noting with slight amusement of their ridiculous dying poses, and that one ecstatic grin stuck to a man's face, the unfortunate sod whose turn was just up.

She does not turn to leave but instead kneels before the girl, and takes into account her unseeing eyes, her broken limbs, her missing teeth, her traumatized trembling. Her still whispering pleas for salvation in an unbroken loop.

She levels her gun and aims.

That night, as she cleans her hand of gunpowder residue, she stares wistfully at the gun, and longs to be the girl she shot.

* * *

The man grovels at her feet, lusting and begging for power.

She tries to remember her previous contractors, but could not go past the last one or two; let alone number them. All of them had been fleeting, brief, and shared two common factors: fruitless contracts and wasted time (who is she kidding? Time for her is plentiful, after all). She had long given up trying to remember each individual and sought to lump them into one instead.

She looks down at the man on his knees: young, strong, noble; yet reduced to a pleading waste at the sight of supremacy. She decides then and there to simply refer to him as her nth contractor.

The limit to the capacity of memory is a convenient thing, she thinks.

* * *

It is not long before she gives up on the hope of having her wish fulfilled and starts searching for contractors to allay her boredom and fill her days with short-lived, mundane entertainment, instead. Especially those of noble heritage; they always make the best spectacle.

* * *

"You don't know him like I do," she says in reply to a thoughtless accusation in his part. An image of a laughing boy with hair white as snow flashes in her mind.

He folds his arms and looks at her with his inquisitive gaze. "Do you know him, then?"

She had shot him cold-bloodedly; but did not fail to notice his relieved contented look when she had said 'I loved you,' before he fell towards the ground staring at nothing with a crooked half-smile, her voice music to his unhearing ears.

It was a lie.

She chuckles and rolls over to face the ceiling. "I don't."

* * *

She looks up towards the youth with the brilliant amethyst eyes, and nuzzles back into his bare arms.

She wishes fervently– desperately that he will not die and they can lie like this forever.

But she instantly recalls the piece of china she had dropped; recalls the glittering broken pieces before she treads on them absently; remembers the blood-stained carpet afterwards. She is made aware again on the fragility of the human life.

He will die.

She is used to it, and ignores the looming despair.

Time heals all wounds, and she has all the time in the world.

**End**


End file.
